Monday, 31 March 2014

So I saw a tweet fromPetethis evening that led me to actually read an email i'd got insisting that I went to the European beer bloggers conference in Dublin. An email i'd totally ignored until this evening.

Firstly and I'll say this right of the bat, i had, and have no intention of going to another beer bloggers conference. There's just other stuff i'd rather go to and as far as i can tell, beer blogging has died a slow, messy and tired death(he says ironically posting for the first time in months...)

Now i'm sorry but there more I work in the business, the less time i really want to spend drinking in my spare time, it's a fact folks, after a while you get bored, well i do. Fucking bored.

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. one of the 'Pulls' for this one is the visit to the great Guinness brewery, now, sorry but Guinness sucks ass, it's a shit, tasteless beer brewed by a spirits company, I drink it when there is literally nothing else on the bar to drink(including gin).

The main reason for me not going is of course that i don't really consider myself to be a blogger anymore, after all this is the first post since 20th December last year so more than 3 months ago, quoting and changing one of the great film quotes of the nineties...

"All the great themes have been used up. Turned into theme parks. So I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted writing genre where's there's nothing original to look forward to and no one to look up to"

Now, granted this may sound a bit teenage, after all it was the nineties when Pump up the Volume came out but it resonates quite easily with the state of the beer writing community(in my opinion) simply because i'm not seeing anything new, and the people that try and do something new just look like they're trying too hard for a story, or a by-line and the people that aren't trying something new just seem like they're stagnating. How can the end of the email possibly make any sense when only 35 people have actually signed up? "The European Beer Bloggers Conference is our highest rated conference out of the six we run each year and you as alumni know it is an awesome time with fun people for very little money. To be honest, if this is not what you want - meals, beer, content, and Irish culture all for little to no money - I am not sure what you are looking for. :)

Highest rated? really? Couldn't give a shit but that may well be because i've been artistically constipated for the lasted 18 months! Have fun with that image!